Sunday, July 31, 2016

Yanks tank: trade Chapman and now Miller for unproven minor league players.

Aroldis Chapman was traded July 25, 2016 for Adam Warren and three minor league players, euphemistically termed prospects by the recipient.

This morning Andrew Miller was traded for four minor league players.

I'm still holding out hope that Yankee general manager Brian Cashman is diabolical enough to flip some of these unproven players still working on their apprenticeships for an actual impactful major league player, maybe lefty starter Chris Sale of the White Sox. That would mean that the Yankees are not tanking and making the final 60 games meaningless.

Some Yankee fans are pleased even though they likely never heard of any of the seven minor league players before the trades and still have no idea how high they played in the minors or how well they have done. So, before you join the media people and congratulate Cashman on starting to clean up the mess he's made of the Yankees, look at the matrix below that I created and then think all this through.

The matrix contains the highest level of professional play and the (Plate Appearances (PA) and OPS) or (Innings and ERA) at that level. Even after a full season at AAA you'd expect a drop in the first major league season. Let's say 10%. So if the OPS is .800, the player would produce .720 ... maybe. And nothing impactful.

You may be in for a shock at their minor league accomplishments.

Aroldis ChapmanbirthdateAgePAOPSInnERA
Adam Warren8/25/1987283263.64major
Gleyber Torres12/13/199619456.761A+
Billy McKinney8/23/199421579.716AA
Rashad Crawford10/15/199322388.701A+
Andrew MillerbirthdateAgePAOPSInnERA
Clint Frazier9/6/19942121.571AAA
J.P. Feyereisen2/7/199323402.23AA
Justus Sheffield5/13/199620953.59A+
Ben Heller8/5/199124252.49AAA

Never trade a somebody for a bunch of nobodies. Saturday, August 1, 2015

3 comments:

Unknown said...

You cherry picked the heck out of those numbers. Frazier has played five games in AAA, how come you didn't use his AA numbers?

Kenneth Matinale said...

"The matrix contains the highest level of professional play"

Pretty straight forward and logical. It's not my fault that Clint Frazier played pro ball for three years before being promoted to AAA. In fact I'm guessing that Cleveland promoted Frazier a week short of the trading deadline to make him more enticing for a sucker like Cashman. It worked. Read today's post on fangraphs rating of the minor league players Cashman got.

Kenneth Matinale said...

http://www.baseball-reference.com/register/team.cgi?id=d5dde62f

2016 Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders

Clint Frazier: AAA with Yankees 25 games, 108 PA:
.228 .278 .396 .674

Nothing special. Frazier now has 3.5 years as a pro.